Question

I’ve been struggling with Logging in WordPress for a while now with CURL (PHP). I think I have tried everything, but it seems that I’ve missed something. I can’t get CURL to save my Cookies when I login.
The weird thing, is that even though I can’t save cookies to file, everything still works more or less, except Upgrading Worpdress Plugins (that is what I am working on currently). I can login to wordpress, and I can even set an automatic ugprade preg_matching the link and curling on it – WordPress core upgrades with no problems, but for some reason when it comes to plugins – I just can’t do it. I had a LOT guesses last night where the problem lies, but nothing did do. Now when I decided to compare the cookies I get from CURL and in FireFox – it turns out that there are no cookies from CURL.

Okay, So here I set the Options (don’t mind the commented stuff, I’ve been checking everything commenting things out and putting them in…).

$cookieFile = 'cookies.txt'; 
$channel = curl_init();

curl_setopt_array($channel, array (
    CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER => FALSE,
    CURLOPT_TIMEOUT =>  60,
    CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION =>  1,
    CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER => 1,
    CURLOPT_COOKIEFILE => $cookieFile,
    CURLOPT_COOKIEJAR => $cookieFile,
    CURLOPT_AUTOREFERER =>  true,
    CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS =>   $loginPostData,
    CURLOPT_POST =>  1,
    #CURLOPT_FRESH_CONNECT => 1
    #CURLOPT_FAILONERROR => 1
));
   # curl_setopt ($channel, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.6) Gecko/20070725 Firefox/2.0.0.6");
#
# Shorten curl_exec for our $channel
#
function copen($openUrl, $custom = FALSE) {
global $channel;global $siteUrl;
if($custom) {$siteUrl = "";}
curl_setopt ($channel, CURLOPT_URL, $siteUrl.$openUrl);
$result = curl_exec ($channel) or die(curl_error($channel));
echo "<h3> Opening: $openUrl </h3>";
return $result;
}

So I did a search, and tried to get the cookies, and failed with this:

     preg_match('/^Set-Cookie: (.*?);/mi', $result, $m);
     echo(parse_url($m[1]));

I also tried echoing the $cookieFile with file_get_contents() – empty. I checked the file about 15 times now – it is a 777 writable file. I tried writing to it with file_put_contents() and succeeded, so there is error in the file location and/or permissions. I am obviously missing something, I just can’t see it.

Best Regards 🙂

Answer 1

Okay, So I found the solution.
After matching the link to crawl with preg_match() from a HTML content, you need to escape the link first (for a reason unknown to me, yet).
We do this with: html_entity_decode($match)